ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the present and presence of illness. It considers the term illness, rather than disease, to denote a useful phenomenological distinction between disease, a pathological process in the biological body, and illness, the lived experience of that disease. It is important to note that the examination of lived experience is integral to historical research and to medicine. Illness and selfhood have been prised apart for too long in the history of philosophy. In MacIntyre's view, philosophy has been doing a disservice to itself by covering over human vulnerability, dependence and affliction. The difference between the objective body and the body-as-lived emerges in illness because the body-as-lived is in large part habitual. Adopting a phenomenological approach, S. Kay Toombs claims that the experience of illness exhibits a typical way of being. The transparency of the healthy body is idealised in philosophical descriptions of health, since this transparency is pierced by experiences in which the body comes to the fore.
